Jerry

I’m originally from the San Francisco Bay area. I’ve been living in New York City, going on 22 years now. I would say that New York is not an easy place to live, and when people want to create excitement like this, this is the perfect place to come because people are so used to being inconvenienced that this is just part of their world.

I wanted to see for myself that people were taking this economy seriously and that they, for a change, instead of bitching about it, were actually going to do something about it.

I am a bill collector. I did my work nationally. I’ve spoken internationally on it. My specialty is getting the money and keeping the customer. Now, in this modern era, they only want to get the money and they don’t really care about the damaged goods. I’m here to change that. I do specialized consulting work. I work with companies that want to do a better job of managing their receivables and, I would say that, I’m so far outside of what people think of as being a bill collector that they have a hard time grasping that you can actually be nice and get the money. Which makes me very effective of course. I haven’t starved. I had a very good company called CFO Advisors; we had clients like Johnson and Johnson, Gannett newspapers, RR Donnelley. And consulting and training, that’s what I enjoy doing. This is what I’ve done for the last 40 years.

I am going on 3 quarters of a century and you’re probably wondering why I’m coming down to Wall Street to see the “occupy” movement. Well it’s because I have enough mileage under me to have seen quite a few opportunities that America’s had to be able to make a difference; many of them failed, some of them worked and so I’m here to see one that’s working. What interests me about the Occupy Wall Street people is their complaint, justified, about the disparity of wealth, the accumulation of debt, and then the way people are treated when they are in debt. So I’m kind of a gadfly of my own industry.

Well I heard about it by way of the Internet but I was on the west coast for family reasons, so I wasn’t able to be there the very first day. But I came down almost immediately because I wanted to see for myself that people were taking this economy seriously and that they, for a change, instead of bitching about it, were actually going to do something about it. And I found that out in spades. So, I was just helping with a student group here that has decided to renounce all debt payments because of the owners interests and the abusive that they come into when they are turned over to debt collectors; its, frankly, a pretty horrible story.

How can people benefit from the work that I can do in the occupation? It’s not about helping me. It’s not about helping me; it’s about me helping somebody else. And the value of my being down here is educational. The most important element that has come out of Occupy Wall Street is education, education, education. They educate the students on this, they educate welfare people on this, they educate the unemployed. So I’m here to educate those who are in debt and want to figure out how to be honorable about it and also not be beaten down by it. It’s an application of the work that I do. So what happens is now I’m on the other side, I’m working with the students to help them get out from under the bill collector. Even if I have little impact, it’s going to be a big one for somebody. So if indeed I can alter the course of somebody’s life, for the better, is that good enough?

It’s not about helping me; it’s about me helping somebody else.

What would I like to see in five years? I would like to see a jubilee. I would like to see all debt written off. I would like to see bankers let off to jail. I would like to see people that have perpetrated financial misdeeds, put away. Maybe a firing squad is a little bit too far to go but, indeed, I would like to see the pain inflicted on them that they’ve inflicted on the American population.